Asus to provide Devil’s Canyon support for Z87, Gigabyte may follow

Intel seems to be getting into the habit of getting in the bad side with DIY desktop enthusiasts, but its always good to see that a brand is making an effort to do the needful.

It was known that Intel might not be providing official support to make their upcoming Haswell CPU refresh called “Devil’s Canyon” with the existing Intel Z87 chipset motherboards. Asus seem to have decided to ignore that clause, and according to a thread in Xtremesystems, Asus Maximus VI Impact will be getting a BIOS update (BIOS 1504) which will ensure the compatibility with Devil’s Canyon CPU and the 20th anniversary Pentium processors. The above picture shows that the engineering sample of i7-4790K paired with Maximus VI Gene with the 1504 BIOS.

To be fair, Intel didn’t deny that Devil’s Canyon will only support Z87 chipset motherboards.. yet. All they said was that it will be compatible with Intel 9 series chipset, as it can be seen above.

In the past when Intel P35 chipsets were around and 45nm Wolfdale made an entry, Intel didn’t really advertise the compatibility between 45nm processors with Intel P35 chipset motherboards, something that back then I didn’t appreciate. It also took some time for manufacturers to release newer BIOS updates to work with 45nm Core-2-duo and Core 2 Quad processors with Intel P35.

Its still not known whether all Intel Z87 motherboards can be made compatible with the upcoming Devil’s Canyon Haswell refresh processors, but sources indicated that Gigabyte would also be releasing BIOS updates for its Z87 motherboards. However, as of now there is no information about the models that will receive this update, nor an official confirmation from Asus or Gigabyte… yet.

But if Intel did introduce a restriction for not providing compatibility, then it means that at the very least tier 1 manufacturers have seem to have started ignoring 1-2 restrictions implemented by Intel, and maybe even breaking couple of NDA restrictions along the way.